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French Street Artist Taking His Work Onstage at City Ballet

JR's installation at the David H. Koch Theater.Credit Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

JR, the French street artist who specializes in large-scale international projects, is taking his collaboration with New York City Ballet off of the floor and onto the stage.

This winter his 6,500-square-foot photo of City Ballet dancers on the floor of the promenade of the David H. Koch Theater went viral, inspiring balletomanes to post pictures of themselves lying on the floor next to the dancers on social media sites. So the company came up with a perhaps more audacious plan for the spring: they asked JR to direct a ballet for the stage.

The work — which is being conceived and directed by JR in his theatrical debut, with help from Peter Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief, in translating his ideas to the stage — will have its premiere on April 29 at the opening of City Ballet’s the spring season.

“Choreographing has been a totally new experience for me,’’ JR, who had never seen a ballet before going to work with the company, said in a statement. “The dancers became my paper and have helped me draw my vision and create new things.”

The new work does not yet have a name (the company says it will be an eight-minute “pièce d’occasion”) but it will be based on JR’s experiences during the 2005 riots in the Parisian suburbs, where he had illegally pasted photographs of young people from the neighborhood on the streets of the housing projects where they lived.

It will feature an original score by Woodkid, 40 company dancers and Lil Buck, whose real name is Charles Riley, whose imaginative jookin-based dances have captured the interest of the dance world. (And beyond: a YouTube video in which he dances “The Swan” as Yo-Yo Ma plays the Saint-Saëns cello score has been viewed more than 2.4 million times.)

Mr. Martins said in a statement that working with JR, who was brought to the company as part of its art series program, which aims to draw fans of the visual arts to ballet, had been an extraordinary experience. “He is an incredibly gifted and visionary artist, and when he approached me with the idea of creating something for the stage I knew that it would be a fitting finale to our 2014 Art Series,” he said.